Three important pieces of information.
First, this, from China:
Temperatures Wednesday in Shanghai hit an all-time high: 105.4 degrees, according to officials here. It was the hottest day in 140 years, since the government began keeping records.
The Chinese megacity is in the midst of its hottest summer ever.
Usually bustling streets are near empty at noon and thousands have gone to hospitals for relief.
Second, there's this from Russia, burning, once again this year:
Russia Experiences Great Burning
I don’t know what’s more troubling — the vast size and extent of smoke and wildfires blanketing Siberia and Russia, or the almost complete silence from Russia and the mainstream media on what appears to be a massive, ongoing climate disaster (Note: NASA did provide an excellent press release via the Earth Observatory link here and below).
In 2010, Russia experienced a deadly heatwave that set off terrible wildfires that belched smoke over many of its more populous cities. These fires spread over a region closer to Europe and so they had great impacts on both property and lives. In 2012, Russia experienced a second spate of massive fires, but these raged over more remote sections of Siberia. At first, Russia was slow to respond. Then, it mobilized an army of firefighters — thousands and thousands — to fight scores of blazes raging across its large, remote Arctic regions. The smoke cloud from these fires was so large it eventually covered a section of the Northern Hemisphere from Siberia to the west coast of North America. Valleys in British Columbia filled with the stench of burning from fires thousands of miles away spurring phone calls from concerned Canadian locals to fire departments there.
Then comes 2013. From spring to summer, central Siberia sweltered under a near constant drought and intermittent heatwaves as a very high amplitude ridge in the Jet Stream enabled a powerful heat dome to form during June and then re-form during late July and early August. The late July heat surge appeared to be the final insult setting off an enormous rash of fires throughout central Siberia and Russia. By early August the number of fires raging out of control swelled to 170. Today, the number is probably closer to three hundred. Human-caused climate change is, yet again, scarring Russia with a terrible set of burn marks.
Then there's this from our own Western mountain states:
The most important part of that article is this:
Across the Western U.S., yearly areas of snowpack are decreasing, and researchers are trying to figure out what that means for everything that relies on the snowmelt...
The Pacific Northwest has lost about 50 percent of its snowpack over the last 50 years.
When you put these three on top of the fact that the glaciers and ice caps are melting and that, last Summer, the US burned from the Southern, Mexican border all the way to the Northern, Canadian one, in all those states--and all the other indicators--I can't imagine how anyone could still deny this.
Well, unless you're an oil or coal company or some such.
Or they watch Fox "News."
Posts
